Festivals
The 77th Venice Film Festival:
2nd-12th September 2020
The longest running A-List film festival in the world since its inception in 1932 (albeit, with a couple of pauses in the 1970s because of political turmoil in Italy), not even Covid-19 could stop Venice going ahead this year. However, there were of course restrictions and it was a slightly subdued affair. A conspicuous example of the more restrained policies in place this year was the barrier that was built on the famous red carpet to comply with the safety guidelines and enforce social distancing. The opening film was The Ties, directed by Daniele Luchetti, and was significantly an acknowledgement to the local crowd in being the first Italian film in 11 years to open the festival.
Main Competition
Cate Blanchett, an A-List festival regular and memorable presence on red carpets, was appointed President of the Main Jury this year. Also in the jury were renowned and versatile American actor Matt Dillon, as well as: Joanna Hogg, British director and screenwriter; the Italian author Nicola Lagioia; and Christian Petzold, the director and screenwriter celebrated in his German homeland, not least at the Berlinale. Veronika Franz, Austrian director and screenwriter, and Ludivine Sagnier, French actress and model, completed the Main Jury line-up.
The Main Competition was cut slightly from its usual 21 to 18 titles this year. As usual, it comprised a panoramic selection from across the world, including Europe (with a good representation from Italy), Israel, Iran, India, North America and Mexico, and Japan. In the end, the jury chose the United States entry Nomadland by Chloé Zhao as the winner of the main Golden Lion Award for Best Film this year. The film, adapted from a 2017 book by journalist Jessica Bruder, stars Frances McDormand (who also co-produced the film) as a woman who leaves her small town to travel around the American West.
Other awards were distributed across the Main Competition film selection: The Grand Jury Prize went to the film New Order by Michel Franco; Silver Lion to Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Wife of a Spy; Volpi Cup for Best Actress to Vanessa Kirby for Pieces of a Woman; Volpi Cup for Best Actor to Pierfrancesco Favino for Padrenostro; Best Screenplay Award to Chaitanya Tamhane for The Disciple; Special Jury Prize to Dear Comrades! by Andrei Konchalovsky; and The Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress went to Rouhollah Zamani for Sun Children.
Horizons Competition
Other regular main sections at Venice included Horizons (Orizzonti), in which this year’s five-person jury was presided over by innovative, highly respected and sometimes controversial French director Claire Denis. The jury further comprised: Oskar Alegria, Francesca Comencini, Katriel Schory and Christine Vachon. This jury also gave many awards from the competition screenings of 19 feature films and 12 shorts. It awarded the feature winner to the Iranian film The Wasteland by Ahmad Bahrami and best short to Entre tú y Milagros (Between You and Milagros) by Mariana Saffon, a Colombia-USA co-production. The Special Jury Prize of the Horizons section went to Listen by Ana Rocha de Sousa. This co-production from United Kingdom-Portugal was also winner of the Lion of the Future (Luigi De Laurentiis) Venice Award for a Debut Film in a jury chaired by Claudio Giovannesi and further comprised of Rémi Bonhomme and Dora Bouchoucha.
One intriguing entry into the Horizons competition program this year was Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop) by Lavrente Indico Diaz (better known as Lav Diaz). Those already familiar with the work of the Filipino director will know that he is synonymous with slow contemplative cinema and, not surprisingly, films with an above average duration. One of his earlier films
Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is ten hours long and one of the longest cinematic narrative films of all time, while some of his more recent prize-winning films, like A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016), also feature high on the longest ever films list. The director is a former film critic and has perhaps been influenced in his work by the proponents of art cinema such as Michangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Theo Angelopoulos.
Lav Diaz is also no stranger to the Venice Film Festival as his 2016 film The Woman Who Left competed at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion.
Genus Pan, comparatively modest in length at just over two and a half hours, still contains his trademark allegories of human greed and brutality, along with monochrome film stock and long takes. Dismayed by the working conditions at a gold mine, three workers journey to their home village on foot through the isolated wilderness of the mythical island Hugaw. The weariness creates a hallucinatory effect for the three main protagonists; two mature men and a younger more capricious colleague. From here, with money, envy and narcissism as the central themes; their relationship and events become more unpredictable and dramatic as the recent back story of the plot unfolds, set against notions of contemporary Filipino society and the long term effects of Japanese and American occupation.
Drawing allusions to the formal elements of Bertholt Brecht in its steady rhythm, Lahi, Hayop consistently uses the static camera and almost always films at the same distance. With no visual reference to the present, the film looks like it could be set at any time in the last 50 years. This is given weight by the fact that the director was inspired by a question asking him to define the human species. His urgent reply was that, despite being the better developed species, most of us still retain the demeanour and comportment of the chimpanzee, the genus Pan, our cousin. Transposed to capitalist society, the film depicts the destructive effects of the human animal, not least through greed. However, the director also finds optimism in that the human brain is still developing, believing that we will eventually become a self-actualized species, following the examples of Buddha or Gandhi.
Genus Pan was to win the Horizons Best Director award this year, in yet another accolade bestowed upon Lavrente Indico (“Lav”) Diaz.
Horizons - The Short Films
The Horizons short film competition in Venice programmed a total of twelve entries this year and the selection was represented by all regions of the world except South America. The sole entry from the United Kingdom was a Scottish film called The Shift, directed by Laura Carreira. It is a candid snapshot of contemporary social dependency in an ever increasing insecure world of employment. A young woman called Anna takes her dog for a walk in the woods and then goes to the local supermarket. Waiting at the checkout, she gets a phone call to tell her that she has lost her shift as a temporary worker. The director stated that she felt the need to represent this common but largely unaddressed social situation and the film poignantly conveys this vulnerability as representation of an increasing amount of people. Shift, therefore, encapsulates the reality of temporary shift work and the shift in personal security, as a powerless young woman sees her life change spontaneously and inexorably.
Although Entre tú y Milagros was the winner of this section, The Shift was to win the Venice Short Film Nomination for the 2020 European Film Awards. The European Short Film Prize is presented annually at the EFA in co-operation with 24 European film festivals, each festival choosing a single candidate.
Two further short films were selected that screened out of competition this year. One of them was the French film The Return of Tragedy, directed by Bertrand Mandico. The other was an intriguing piece called Si by Italian director Luca Ferri. Running at just under 20 minutes, it has a split screen effect; the left side for the visuals, the right for text. In his notes, the director talks of Si as being the first of five planned films representing absence. Here, a man studies a series of encyclopaedic images from the Prelinger Archives, illustrating the creation of the cosmos. Humanity is conspicuously absent, represented only in its works and ruins. The man falls asleep and sinks into a nightmare of arctic hunters killing polar bears, while the compellingly melancholic soundtrack features two pieces of contemporary music by the composer Agazzi with the text linked to the director's personal childhood memory of a suicide. Hope and redemption are also tellingly absent in this unique and pessimistic appraisal of the contemporary human condition.
Venice Virtual Reality Expanded
The other major competition was the Venice VR Expanded. The Jury was chaired by Céline Tricart and also composed of Asif Kapadia and Hideo Kojima. This forward-looking section had a maximum of 30 world-premieres or international premieres of Immersive Projects with formal elements that ranged from 360 degree videos, along with 3DOF (Three Degrees of Freedom) and 6DOF interactive works. Further films were out of competition but after viewing the 31 projects in competition, the Jury awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR Immersive Work to The Hangman at Home by Michelle and Uri Kranot (Denmark-France-Canada) for its Best Immersive Single User Experience. The other awards went to Finding Pandora X by Kiira Benzing (USA) for Best VR Immersive User Experience and Killing a Superstar (Sha Si Da Ming Xing) by Fan Fan (China) for the Best Immersive Story.
Venice Critics’ Week
Venice Critics’ Week (Settimana Internazionale della Critica) is an annual Venice autonomous section that is similar to the one in Cannes. Just like the FIPRESCI award, it gives film critics a chance to pick their favourite film for early artistic achievement and innovation. This year the section had seven films in competition and two out of competition. Ghosts (Hayaletler), directed by Azra Deniz Okyay, was not only the feature debut by the director but also the first Turkish film since 2018 to feature in the Venice program. It is being represented in international markets by MPM Premium’s New Visions label, which is dedicated to promising directors. Set over a day during a nationwide power surge, it is full of fast-paced energy as four different characters gravitate towards each other due to the high stakes of drug trafficking in the ghetto streets of Istanbul. A film that stays in the memory and will please both young audiences and traditional devotees of thrillers with elements of mystery and deception, it was rewarded with the winning prize in this section.
Venice Days
The other main autonomous competition section is Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) and this year it comprised of ten films in competition as well as a non-competition and special events sections. The winner was The Whaler Boy (Kitoboy), a Polish entry directed by Philipp Yuryev, part of a co-production with Russia and Belgium. An original take on a conventionally simple narrative, it was elevated by its compellingly contemplative pacing and central performances, as well as experimental use of visuals that succeeded very well.
In a remote whaling village in the vast wasteland of the Bering Strait that divides Russia from America a teenager dreams of a girl he met on the internet and sets off on a journey to find her. Kitoboy’s location on the edge of the world is reminiscent of the Russian 2010 Berlinale Main Competition entry How I Ended This Summer by Alexei Popogrebsky, but draws more allusions in its narrative to Sarah Gavron’s 2012 feature Village at the End of the World. Though more contemplative in tone than the latter, there is likewise an ironic denouement in The Whaler Boy, while all three films have in common the effects of remoteness and isolation on people of all ages.
Finally, The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was given to the legendary Hong Kong film director Ann Hui and legendary British actress Tilda Swinton. The closing film for the Venice Film Festival this year was You Came Back (Lasciami andare), directed by Stefano Mordini and appropriately another Italian film to book-end the festival.
Steven Yates
